Phoebe Bridgers at a 2023 concert.
Photo: Gus Stewart/Redferns
About halfway through her Madison Square Garden concert last night, Phoebe Bridgers sent out a request to the audience: If anyone smuggled an Apple Watch into the theater by storing it in their butt, could they please not post any videos online? MSG was Bridgers’s last stop in a series of intimate performances across the country to debut new songs and get her back in the groove after touring with Boygenius in 2023. Tickets were distributed through a lottery system and cost just $1 to $20, all of which went to Community Justice Exchange’s Immigration Bond Freedom Fund, which works to free people from ICE detention. She announced her NYC show on June 1, and it became the hottest ticket in town (outside of the Knicks playoff). Going into credit-card debt to get good seats wasn’t an option, which meant that Bridgers’s fanbase, which ranges from emotional bisexuals, rock-obsessed dads, and depressed gays, was scrambling to either get lucky or find a lucky friend to bring them. Those who managed to get in found themselves faced with a strict phone prohibition. Also banned? Paper and pencil, because, her team informed me, fans had been jotting down lyrics and posting them online. As a journalist, not being able to take notes was as stressful as it was exhilarating. What follows is my attempt to reconstruct the show from memory. If I get something wrong … well, blame her, not me.
Before Bridgers even walked onstage, the room was buzzing. MSG was populated with fans bedecked in merch from old Bridgers shows or emblazoned with the name of her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julian Baker. Please Don’t Destroy’s Martin Herlihy arrived wearing a Knicks cap, and Claud, a singer on Bridgers’s imprint, Saddest Factory Records, sat close to the front holding court with those around them. Waiting for Bridgers to arrive, phoneless youngsters in MSG’s top tier began choreographing waves of cheers; other people met fellow Pharbs in their row. Watching an unplugged crowd actually interact reminded me of the lunchrooms in high schools that didn’t allow smartphones where ninth-graders were suddenly running full poker games. My coworker Cat Zhang turned to me and whispered, “They’re too energetic for people on Lexapro.”
The star arrived at approximately 9 p.m. on a smaller-than-usual stage featuring neon posters, a couch with a draped chevron blanket, and two keyboards — one masked as a coffee table. When she appeared, the massive crowd went wild. Her short set opened with “Motion Sickness,” one of the balladeer’s most popular songs and one of few true toe-tappers. But Bridgers took the banger and made it even more intimate. Her acoustic version forced the audience into a comfortable silence. Two songs later, she performed a similar maneuver on her other anthem, “Kyoto.” The message was clear: She’s not meeting the venue on its scale — the whole arena will be coming to her. After “Kyoto” came potentially the saddest track Bridgers has ever written: the mournful love song “Moon Song,” which she built to a crescendo that brought multiple people around me to tears.
After that, Bridgers got into the new tracks. Playing with her onstage were keyboardist Nick White and Christian Lee Hutson, Maya Hawke’s new husband, on guitar. The songs leaned more country than Bridgers’s typical oeuvre, with Hutson reaching for the harmonica more than once. One song accused a lover of being like one of Peter Pan’s lost boys and failing to mature. Another grappled with a straining relationship that she doesn’t want to let go of, refusing to let him forget that he loves her. Sometimes, the more stoic ballads would give way to epic conclusions during which Bridgers would let her fluttery voice gain muscle and take control of the arena. In total, she sang eight new songs, always sitting, often beginning a little nervously, and then letting the music take over her body.
In the time since Bridgers’s last solo record, 2020’s Punisher, she’s not only become dramatically more popular as a musician (featuring on a Taylor Swift song didn’t hurt), but she has become something of a tabloid fixture as well. She dated, reportedly got engaged to, then broke up with Paul Mescal, who is currently with Gracie Abrams, and is now reportedly dating comedian Bo Burnham. It’s a tricky task for a public figure to write confessional music, but Bridgers appeared willing to dive in. One song made reference to calling off an engagement. She began another by noting she was still waiting on a late period. All of it was intensely personal, grappling with the horror of being known — by a partner, potentially, but I also wondered if it could be about her audience.
Bridgers alternated between being wry and earnest when chatting with the eager crowd. Yes, she talked about butt smuggling, but she also mused on the current chaos of the world and made a point of thanking anyone in attendance who had “defected” from conservative parents. She marveled at the fact that the audience was so deviceless, noting that she herself had never been to a concert like this before. With a smirk, she announced that she’ll be going on tour next fall, also phoneless. When she played her song “Graceland Too,” some audience members began waving lighters. Suddenly, I realized I’d never seen actual lighters at a concert outside movies because now people just use their phone flashlights.
Before her final, apocalyptic song, “I Know the End,” Bridgers instructed the audience to join her in a primal scream at its close. As she sang the track’s quieter first half, everybody in the crowd slowly got their feet, clapping along. Then she busted into the rockabilly second portion, building the energy in the room higher and higher. By the time the scream came around, the entirety of MSG was ready. The arena wailed and wailed, getting out of breath before screaming some more. Everybody around me contorted their faces into hideous expressions as they screamed. The best part was that nobody had to worry ending up on TikTok the next day.
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